NEC HPC Group Selects SAN from Dot Hill

Dot Hill Systems Corp. has been selected by NEC Corp.‘s High Performance Computing Europe (NEC HPCE) to supplement its parallel file system LXFS, based on Lustre technology.

The joint solution, which integrates Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 and 3003 storage arrays with NEC’s file system products, has already been deployed at several university research data centres as well as at development centres in the automotive industry.
 
NEC HPC Europe which is headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany, tested the AssuredSAN 3000 and AssuredSAN 3003 storage arrays before selecting them for deployment with LXFS. The R&D and storage team was satisfied that the systems met NEC’s requirements in terms of performance and reliability.
 
"Technical and scientific computing creates huge amounts of data at a high rate, therefore scalable file systems became critical components for building HPC systems. Dot Hill storage complements our LXFS parallel file system by exceeding our customers’ expectations in terms of scalability, reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness," said Dr. Erich Focht, senior manager R&D and Storage Products for NEC High Performance Computing Europe. "We take advantage of the 6Gb SAS host interface option offered by the AssuredSAN platform connected in a DAS configuration which provides a robust and scalable infrastructure for our performance-intensive applications."
 
NEC LXFS is a scalable parallel file system product designed to offer huge storage capacities with balanced performance especially for mid- and large-scale HPC systems. LXFS consists of server hardware, storage hardware, file system software, a deployment concept, a management and monitoring concept paired with an emphasis on reliability and redundancy and bundled with support services. It is built out of basic building blocks allowing for scaling and configuration in terms of capacity and performance.
 
"Dot Hill is proud to be a partner of choice for NEC a recognized leader in the HPC space. We are delighted that our AssuredSAN storage systems can contribute to the success of NEC’s LXFS solution. Both companies are committed to providing customers with the maximum performance and reliability in their data centres, making the partnership a win-win situation for all parties," said Joerg Vogel, channel sales manager Continental Europe, Dot Hill.
 
The Dot Hill storage portfolio offers up to 288TB of capacity in a single system and demonstrated 99.999% availability. Its systems feature the storage networking technologies such as 8Gb FC and 6Gb SAS. Dot Hill’s SimulCache technology leverages redundant RAID controllers, thus eliminating the performance degradation associated with conventional cache mirroring. The implementation of a dedicated PCIe bus streamlines write-performance resulting in overall system responsiveness, driving faster application throughput. Dual redundant RAID controllers, dual power supplies and dual fans ensure customers don’t experience downtime or data loss.
 
NEC provided HPC solutions for decades. Their hardware platforms range from server clusters to powerful vector systems, providing an integrated HPC solution that takes the complexity out of planning and deployment.